WHO cures cancer in Photoshop?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has a cancer research unit in France, IARC. Some papers from there contain impressive manipulations. The works of art are authored by Massimo Tommasino and his former junior colleague there Uzma Hasan, now tenured group leader at INSERM. Some of this research took place at the Schering-Plough Research Institute which was taken over by German pharma giant Merck.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently included Traditional Chinese Medicine into its global medical compendium, thus recognising that dried and powdered bits of rare and endangered animals can cure all possible ailments and diseases. But of course Modern Medicine remains valid also, and in fact the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), with its seat in Lyon, France, uses modern technologies to find new cancer therapies. One such digital technology, applied very efficiently all very the world, is based on Photoshop, where images of western blots and other research data get artistically modified to facilitate the publishability of the postulated cancer therapy ideas in respected peer reviewed research journals. It does not really help cancer patients, but the beneficial effect on the academic and industry careers of such scientists is extremely significant and has been extensively validated and reproduced over the years.

The cancer researchers at WHO whose papers contain such impressive manipulations, are Massimo Tommasino, head of Infections and Cancer Biology Group at IARC, and his former junior colleague there Uzma Hasan, now tenured group leader at INSERM in Lyon. Some of their best or worst papers (depending how you judge it) were authored together with an industrial researcher,Jaromir Vlach, working for the Schering-Plough Research Institute which was eventually taken over by the German pharma giant Merck (known in USA as EMD).The evidence was posted on PubPeer by anonymous commenters, one of whom was the pseudonymous Clare Francis, who also alerted me to that case.

Update 3.12.2019: WHO now pronounced that their investigation:

“Found no evidence of scientific misconduct and concluded that the allegations made on PubPeer are not adequately supported and are therefore unfounded”

This was for example what Hasan, Tommasino and Vlach published on the topic of immune system responses, in the elite journal PNAS, Hasan et al 2007:

This figure contains a plethora of duplicated gel bands, so much that it is actually almost funny. Who is responsible, we do not know. The contributions say that Tommasino only contributed “new reagents/analytic tools”, while research was designed by Vlach and the two first authors. The first and corresponding author Hasan was at that time already in Tommasino’s IARC department for Infections and Cancer Biology. That PNAS paper of hers contains many other examples of Photoshop activities, like this Figure 5 here:

The industry researcher Vlach is the last author and the project designer, but it seems the work was done at IARC, since that this Photoshop tour de force was publicly funded:

The afore-ridiculed Figure 1A of Hasan et al PNAS 2007 contains elements which previously appeared in a different context, in a different paper and likely also in a different lab where Hasan worked until 2005, at Schering-Plough with Vlach (Hasan et al JBC 2005):

That 2005 paper appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which is known to be tough on data manipulation, might become a problem for this paper’s three authors. Good for Tommasino that he is not one of them. There is even a duplicated flow cytometry measurement, quantified slightly differently, maybe to obscure similarities.

Also this Hasan et al JBC 2005 study contains more of creative tricks which helped the authors elucidate the molecular pathway of Toll-signaling in immune cells. Who knew it happens through post-experimental digital data duplication?

Hasan’s work at Schering-Plough before her move to IARC with Tommasino was truly productive. Look at this interesting figure from Hasan et al J Immunology 2005:

The framed western blot two images for Flag/HA are very similar, except the upper gel band. How can this be? Can someone accidentally reuse same image twice, while accidentally erasing the top band in one of them? There is more to find in that paper also. Tommasino is not coauthor, but is credited with having provided “invaluable advice on this manuscript”, just like in the other Hasan et al JBC 2005 paper from Schering-Plough, now part of Merck.

With Tommasino as last author, but now without Vlach and his pharma industry input, Hasan authored same year 2007 this paper, Hasan et al J Immunology 2007. Also here, Hasan is corresponding author. This IARC study helped us understand how cervical cancer develops and offered “future promise for the prevention of infectious diseases, cancer, and autoimmune diseases“. This is how this promise works, and this is just one example from that paper:

Apparently, by re-using certain western blot bands, a potential prevention therapy for cervical cancer can be established. Amazing research, done by WHO scientists at IARC, with public support:

2007 was a particular year in Tommasino’s IARC lab, with a particularly rich harvest of Photoshopped papers in prestigious journals. Also this paper features Hasan as one of coauthors, Mansour et al, Virology 2007., Tommasino is the corresponding author. The study offers insights into mechanisms of cervix cancer progression and suggests how this cancer can be early detected. This is how the clinical approach would work:

Female patient at risk of cervical cancer will be asked to sit upon the printout of these Photoshopped western blot images, or other examples from that paper. Any resident cervical cancer cells inside the patient will be appalled by such pathetically crude data manipulations of loading controls and die in shame. In case you wonder, why some authors need to manipulate such allegedly unimportant bits of the figure like loading controls: it’s probably because the correct loading controls would have rendered the entire figure as useless or even fraudulent. Hence, cancer is being attacked not with science, but with Photoshop. This is probably exactly what EU Commission had in mind when funding this travesty :

“The study was partially supported by grants from European Union (LSHC-2005-018704) Deutsche Krebshilfe (grant N. 10-1847-To I), and Association for International Cancer Research to MT and a grant from La Ligue Contre le Cancer (Comité du Rhône)”

Tommasino never had a high opinion of loading controls anyway, it seems he saw them as nuisance and tried to make a point of this by publishing such ridiculously Photoshopped stuff. Who is interested in how much sample was loaded where, if the end picture of signal differences and its scientific message is what matters? Nobody, that’s WHO. This is why we find in older Tommasino papers figures like this, in Malanchi et al 2004 or Giarre et al 2001, both passed peer review in Journal of Virology:

We learn that viruses play a key role in carcinogenesis, and the correct way to clinically intervene on viral infection to prevent cancer is to reuse loading controls for various experiments, to placate some pesky peer reviewers.

Even the EMBO fellow and newly minted INSERM group leader Dr Hasan was back at publishing copy-pasted cancer therapy ideas, at Journal of Experimental Medicine, Hasan et al, JEM, 2012:

We now see how such creative approach to cancer research literally paid out for Hasan:

The penultimate authorRuslan Medzhitov is elite HHMI-funded researcher at Yale, USA, he is also thanked for his advice in several manuscripts by Hasan, Vlach and Tommasino. What will he say of such unconventional approach which as the authors assure, “may provide a novel therapeutic strategy for cervical cancers”?

I informed Merck and WHO Ethics team about those issues in August 2018. Merck replied that they “take such inquiries seriously” and are reviewing the information on Vlach’s publications which I sent them. From WHO, a request for more information arrived, because the PubPeer information was deemed insufficient as such:

“from the links you have posted, we can see the titles of a number of publications but it is difficult to assess what may have happened. We would need to know specifically which data may have been changed, in which publications, when and by whom.”

I replied immediately with explanatory examples, but have not heard from the WHO Ethics Team ever again. My recent two requests for an update went unanswered as of yet.

Update 3.12.2019

In November 2019, I wrote to WHO again. I received a reply: WHO expects PubPeer to remove slanderous evidence against their scientists who did absolutely NOTHING wrong.

This is the statement I received:

“Thank you for bringing your concerns to the attention of WHO. We have reviewed them and an investigation was undertaken into the matter.

The investigation looked at each allegation made and a rigorous approach was adopted further to the IARC Policy on Scientific Misconduct, as publicly available on the IARC internet site.

The allegations relate entirely to gel and blot “splicing”. This was and to a large extent still is common practice to reduce the size and complexity of figures which are illustrations derived from multiple experiments, and not intended to show the results of those individual experiments. Cell Press (http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/common-pitfalls-in-figure-prepartion) say, “it is OK to remove irrelevant or blank lanes from a gel in order to present your data in a streamlined way to readers, but when you do it, you need to mark it clearly so that there is obvious transparency about how the figure was prepared” (2015). The Journal of Cell Science have suggested that “Any grouping or consolidation of data (e.g. removal of lanes from gels and blots or cropping of images) must be made apparent (i.e. with dividing lines or white spaces) and should be explicitly indicated in the figure legends.” (see http://jcs.biologists.org/sites/default/files/Revisionattachment_JCS.pdf )

It is noted that the splicing was not hidden deliberately, though on occasion it is noted it was less obvious in the printed figure and the figure legends did not always make the splicing clear. These minor errors are common in papers and should be avoided. The authors in question have been informed of what IARC expects and a policy on gels and blots from the Journal of Cell Science has been adopted.

Noting all this, the investigation:

Found no evidence of scientific misconduct and concluded that the allegations made on PubPeer are not adequately supported and are therefore unfounded,

Identified a small number of individual cases where errors in the figures require corrections, and

Advised the authors to provide all available original data for the papers cited on PubPeer to the journal editors for their information.

Further to the above and in line with the IARC Policy on Scientific Misconduct and the investigation, it was determined that the matter could be closed.”

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121 comments on “WHO cures cancer in Photoshop?”

These are the type of things that totally put an end of any truthful and truly useful cancer research other scientists may want to perform and let many patients keep dying of cancer and some donating their samples unfruitfulless

Director of International Strategy, Medical Research Council, United Kingdom.

” It was a privilege to have chaired the Governing Council of IARC for four years. The work of the Agency is even more important now than when it was first established, and the continuing increase in the number of Participating States supporting the Agency demonstrates its global relevance and reach. ”

Lyon is known for its food, but did he look at any of the data?

Dr Mark Palmer is Director of International Strategy at the Medical Research Council (MRC). He has a degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford, where he also completed his doctorate on the murine immune response to influenza. He has responsibility for MRC′s international policy and coordination of global health strategy.

Dr Palmer has served as Chairperson of the IARC Governing Council, Chair of the General Assembly of the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the Human Frontier Science Programme (HFSP), and Vice-President of the Korea–United Kingdom London Health Forum. He serves on the Governing Council of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC) and on the Board of ELIXIR. Dr Palmer is also the United Kingdom lead for Societal Challenge 1 (Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing) of the European Commission′s Framework Programme Horizon 2020.

I vehemently disagree, MRC is very much the right people to cover for Tommasino and Hasan at IARC. They did an impressive work in enthusiastically endorsing every regenerative medicine circus freak show UCL et al choose to roll out, most notably Birchall’s cadaveric larynges and tracheas.

If WHO supports all of these research misconduct I quite can understand now how has been so difficult for myself to move forward with my research as I have seen people with I work with making these type of data manipulations (and others) and
these people indeed keep being invited as keynote speakers for conferences
WHO has an enormous ethical responsibility and should consider taking adequate measures to solve this case and thus contribute to fair and clean research useful for all of us
Any of us can suffer of cancer or other serious illness….even the cheaters are not rid of it…will they test their cheated therapies on themselves eventually if they develop a cancer?

Great, now I can’t get that ‘Frankengel, gel gel gel gel gel gel, gel gel Gel! Frankengel!’ song out of my head, sung in the tune of ‘Baby Shark’ after I started singing it to my child right after reading this post.

I already was sort of expecting to definitely die of my future cancer with the type of Frenkengels I keep seeing on websites like this for the last five years, but is there a way for them to pay for any mental hospitalization I might require from this Frankenshark fiasco?

As an outsider to both fields (so my thinking might be wrong), the nano stuff is a welcome change, but it still is kind of weird to me how you need to copy and paste these particles since if you take enough pics, you just show one of them. Maybe some particle pictures where you need to show regularity, but some of those look like they were just too lazy to keep scanning. The gels seem to show a lot of thought and knowledge that the person doing the manipulating possesses. Like they are familiar with pathways and protein names, and are theoretically a good scientist. With nano-stuff, it’s so basic that I’m not so sure that the people faking data understand what they are doing. Oh well… That’s what happens when nano is the Latin word that means ‘funding’.

By the way I know an expert in gel manipulation, Hector Peinado
He already had to make corrections in two papers and has a couple of papers signaled at PubPeer for gel manipulations
Someone as mentioned in PubPeer warned CNIO about this without success

Honestly I think Hector Peinado should give good explanations about all of the gel manipulations (and other comments) which appear in PubPeer
A good opportunity for him to do this will be UKEV2018 conference at Sheffield on December 11, 2018 where he is invited as a keynote speaker

“From WHO, a request for more information arrived, because the PubPeer information was deemed insufficient as such:

“from the links you have posted, we can see the titles of a number of publications but it is difficult to assess what may have happened. We would need to know specifically which data may have been changed, in which publications, when and by whom.”

Members of WHO could take a look at the annotated images in Pubpeer, then check these against the original publications. Which people have changed data and when this happened is for members of WHO to figure out. Surely the WHO has a research integrity officer, who should be au fait with such matters?

“The gels seem to show a lot of thought and knowledge that the person doing the manipulating possesses. Like they are familiar with pathways and protein names, and are theoretically a good scientist.”

Akin to a religion: as long as you do not offend any of the central tenets you can publish. People can know how it should work by looking at papers, getting to know what what people in the field believe. You might make a reasoned guess at what should go up or down, even be correct in your guess, but no experiments are done.

And would you be happy with guesses and no experiments?
I submitted a complaint with some original data from the time I coincided with Hector Peinado at Cornell and these data does not have nothing to do with what was published….so their guesses are very poor

I am glad to hear that
I am exposing myself and telling my history and I hope this inspires other PhD students, postdocs, researchers not to stay silent and to denounce and to gather so that we can improve the uselfuness of science and and avoid wastage of resources

The saddest part of this is that scientists are displaced (unemployed) because such behaviour is either not detected, or if it is, nothing is done. At present image manipulation is rewarded. Much easier to make it up, more publications, more grants…more likely to valued by universities/institutions.

I have sent an expression of concern to WHO and I will encourage all readers to do the same. Quite easy and you get an confirmation that they have received your message. You can also chose to be anonymous.

PNAS papers are as safe as houses. Notoriously difficult to get PNAS to shift anything.

“As for Dr. Croce’s work, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has reversed its stance.

After being contacted by The Times, the journal’s editor, Ms. Sullenberger, consulted with Dr. O’Brien at Berkeley and other analysts. The expert who in 2014 thought the duplication was unlikely, she said, now “accepts the new analyses because of their sophisticated nature.”

The journal, Ms. Sullenberger said, is now planning to issue a notice to readers about concerns regarding the WWOX paper.”

No wonder there are so many publications on p53, one of its discoverers has set the standard for image manipulation and the others follow.

Mature self-supporting religion, good at gathering funds from cancer charities (front organisations for members of their scientific advisory boards, e.g. prof Nick Lemoine sits of the scientific advisory board https://www.pancreaticcancer.org.uk/research/our-policies-advisory-board/scientific-advisory-board/ “Professor Nick Lemoine, Director of the Barts Cancer Institute, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London, UK”
and his institute receives funds from the same charity,

“And some scientists who engage in public outreach are critical thinkers about studies everywhere, like molecular biologist Leonid Schneider and microbiologist Dr. Elisabeth Bik, who have called out groups who do this and also journal editors who enable them with a desire to publish provocative claims that will bring international media links.

A recent analysis of both journals and IARC involvement, titled WHO Cures Cancer In Photoshop, went into detail about the cultural flaws that allowed IARC to lose its way but more broadly about how easy it is to duplicate or reuse or slightly change graphics to look original in a science study. “

There is more in Fig 7 panel E. JARED1B (upper set) is reverese image of ERα (lower set). Very obvious! This activity hurts all of science and the perpetrators should be banished, including the ‘unobservant’ PIs.

The work of Edward E Whang, Harvard, Mark Duxbury (previously Harvard), and Dr Siong-Seng Liau (previously Harvard), on any link between high mobility group (HMG) proteins and cancer needs to be urgently reviewed as Alfredo Fusco now has 21 retractions in this very area (many retracted publications on HMG proteins), often using the same technique of Photoshop.

If you turn to the editors to correct the scientific record you might presume that they would be fine upstanding individuals and would make attempts at correction, but then again you might be in for a scene from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Black and White version is scarier).

“Their previous two retractions, which we reported on in 2013, were also for image manipulation. At the time, Perez-Soler told us that Ling “accepted full responsibility for the changes” and he had “returned to his home country.””

“Luke Hesson, who recently joined Philip Cohen’s Group as a postdoc, visited the House of Lords on 8 June 2005 as a member of the research team at the University of Birmingham, who received the “Team of the Year 2004″ award from the Breast Cancer Campaign.

This award is granted to the research team who have been most successful in publishing and presenting the results of their research, and for their continued commitment into researching the cure for breast cancer. One of the main interests of the team, led by Professor Farida Latif , is the study of the RASSF family of tumour suppressor genes, which are proapoptotic K-ras effectors. As part of this team Luke Hesson helped to identify interacting partners of the tumour suppressor gene RASSF1A. He then went on to identify, clone and characterise other members of the RASSF gene family and found that several, like RASSF1A, were inactivated by promoter DNA hypermethylation in several forms of cancer, including breast cancer. In an effort to understand the roles of these other RASSF members in tumourigenesis he then went on to investigate their function using the yeast two-hybrid system. His research provides possible diagnostic markers for early detection of a range of cancers as well as identifying therapeutic targets for the inhibition of cancer cell growth.”

“The above article, published online on 7 February 2005, in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor‐in‐Chief, Prof. Peter Lichter, the Union for International Cancer Control and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to reuse of several figure panels in the paper. Due to the time elapsed since the publication of the article, the original data for these figures are no longer available for re‐analysis. The authors are therefore not able to confirm the accuracy of the reported results or provide updated figures to replace the duplicated panels.”

Professor Hill is the Chairman of Surgery in Beaumont Hospital and Head of the Medical School in the Royal College of Surgeons. Having trained extensively in the US, Professor Hill returned to Dublin to initially work at St Vincents Hospital and then onto Beaumont Hospital. He is the nationally appointed advisor for surgical oncology on behalf of the National Cancer Control Programme in Ireland.

“Dr. Croce contends that not all papers on which his name is listed were the product of research either conducted by him or under his supervision. But the Court believes that an ordinary reader would credit such a paper, on which Dr. Croce willingly allowed his name to appear as a co-author, to him”.

This will apply in North Carolina. We can thank Carlo Croce’s pugnaciousness for bringing the excuse of only being a co-author to the attention of the courts as a way of avoiding taking responsibility. We have the answer.

Figure 1A: E7 and GAPDH panels appear to contain background irregularities;
Figure 1B: the bands in the total p38 and total JNK panels appear similar, cropped and adjusted for brightness and contrast;
Figure 1C: total ERK1/2 panel contains vertical discontinuities;
Figure 1C: GAPDH panel appears similar to the Figure 1B GAPDH panel 1B;
Figure 2A: E7 panel has a vertical change in background between the nc and +tet lanes;
Figure 2A: GAPDH panel background appears dissimilar between bands;
Figure 4B: Phospho-p38 panel has a vertical change in background between the middle lanes;
Figure 5A: Phospho RhoA and total RhoA panels have been heavily adjusted for brightness/contrast;
Figure 6A: Active RhoA panel has vertical discontinuities between the 3 and 6 hr bands.
The corresponding author does not agree with the concerns raised and provided images in relation to Figure 1B totp38 and totJNK panels, Figure 1C total ERK panel, Figure 2A GAPDH and E7 panels, Figure 4B Phospho-p38 panel, Figure 5A phospho RhoA panel and Figure 6A Active RhoA panel, but these do not satisfactorily resolve the concerns raised for these items. The primary data underlying other figure panels has not been provided, which was attributed to the time that has passed since publication.

In light of the unresolved concerns that question the validity of the study’s findings, the PLOS ONE Editors retract the article.

RAC, MRG, PC, VC, MT, and SJR did not agree with retraction. GB, AB, RA, AC, SM, and AP did not respond.

The answer from WHO is very worrying. I also sent an expression of concern, but dit not hear back.

Are there any information regarding the “investigation”? Who from WHO was involved? The “investigation” report should be publicly available.

Rune Linding suggested that this should be reported to The Office of Internal Oversight Services, the internal oversight body of the United Nations. We should! I will do that and hope that more will join.

Thank you for your report dated 19 December 2019 to the Investigations Division, Office of Internal Oversight Services (ID/OIOS).

Your report has been carefully reviewed. Unfortunately, the subject of your complaint falls outside the mandate of ID/OIOS, which deals with misconduct matters involving UN staff and resources. As such, we are unable to assist in your query.

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